Lucifer in Dub

L.A. neo-psych duo Peaking Lights are about as close as you can get to a modern dub act without actually being one. Their 2012 album Lucifer turned that influence into other strains of cosmic head-trip music, but this follow-up companion piece makes the implicit explicit.

Given their fondness for rhythmic repetition, reverberating vocals, watery ambience, and analog synths, matrimonial L.A. neo-psych duo Peaking Lights are about as close as you can get to a dub act without actually being a dub act. But where the band's 2012 release, Lucifer, saw that island influence fused into other strains of cosmic head-trip music (60s psychedelia, Krautrock, shoegaze), this follow-up companion piece serves to make the implicit explicit. No false advertising here: Lucifer in Dub does exactly what it says it's going to do, with Aaron Coyes re-engineering Indra Dunis' dreamy pop melodies into echo-plexed incantations while greatly amplifying the percussive clatter we imagined to be percolating beneath the hypnotic haze. But this remix album proves so faithful to its antecedent that it verges on the redundant.

Featuring cheekily titled revisions of six Lucifer songs (while forsaking the album's brief bookend tracks), Lucifer in Dub is more a protraction of its predecessor than a radical reworking. Had the band continued to ride out the tropical grooves of originals "Cosmic Tides", "Live Love", or "Midnight (In the Valley of Shadows)" for another seven minutes, the songs probably would've naturally mutated into what we hear on their equivalents, "Cosmic Dub", "Live Dub", and "Midnight Dub", which closely resemble their respective source tracks in both feel and form, albeit with added textural freakiness and a more aggressive energy bleeding into the productions. But beyond these gradual, subtle enhancements, Lucifer in Dub doesn't afford us much opportunity to see these songs in a new light-- it essentially renders what was already a trippy, amorphous album slightly more trippy and amorphous. Really, the closest this set comes to going off the hook is when the "Beautiful Son" redux ("Beautiful Dub") announces itself with the now antiquated, staccato tone of a phone that needs to be placed back on its receiver.

The musical exploitation of household items is a common dub device, but on Lucifer in Dub, the aforementioned phone effect or the doorbell ringing throughout "Lo Dub High Dub" provide a novel means for Coyes and Dunis to obliquely reference the theme of domestic bliss that runs through Lucifer. A little more of that abstract logic could've gone a long way in making Lucifer in Dub a more distinct, stand-alone piece. As it stands, the ideal way to experience this record is to make a playlist pairing off its tracks with their original counterparts, so that each Lucifer song essentially dissolves into its own distended, dubbed-out coda. In its most transfixing moments, Lucifer emitted the sort of soothing, mesmerizing sound that you wish could go on forever-- at the very least, Lucifer in Dub affords us a few more minutes in the service of that ideal.